


The Good Life

by The_Rolling_Tomes



Category: No Fandom
Genre: Amateur Bartending, Everyone Survives It's Totally Fine, Fish-Swallowing, Gay dads, It's Fluff Don't @ Me, M/M, Seafood Doesn't Go In That, Surprise Extended Lifespan, Vampire Family, Vampires, Very Mild Adult Language, Vomiting, We Didn't Sign Up For This As Parents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-11-02 07:20:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20665955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Rolling_Tomes/pseuds/The_Rolling_Tomes
Summary: Worry only when the kids are quiet, Vampire Edition.





	The Good Life

In a cul-de-sac wedged between Swanton Middle School and several other residential developments, a three-story colonial baked in the hot afternoon sun and housed the neighborhood’s first vampire family.

It was a pretty place, new, its cream siding still innocent of time and Vermont’s spring cycles of runoff and refreeze. Brown trim and shutters - a shade that hadn’t managed the Homeowner’s Association’s ire but earned no points for stringent conformity - still bore a few Home Depot stickers on their undersides, well out of sight. Even the driveway, newly paved along its gentle decline, hadn’t endured enough sunny days to match the duller gray of the road. It looked permanently wet, and the contrast became more striking when it rained.

Bits of straw peeked through grass around the driveway’s edge, the slow disintegration of old things vegetable leaving sign of the original lawn seeding like unswept campground confetti streamers, detritus now moldering and bleaching in the sun. On the pavement itself, childhood arcana had been chalked around a pair of bicycles. 

The varied subjects suggested two children of a similar age bracket but distinct eras of childhood indulgence - one had committed to the fantasy equine by depicting an exaggerated unguligrade’s stride and a windblown rainbow mane, the other child enamored of a yellow rectangle afforded cartoon sapience via gap teeth and bulging eyes. The bikes reinforced the distinction, with the larger metallic blue one resting on its kickstand, the smaller so coated in stickers its original color was barely discernible. The stickered victim sat resting balanced on a single fat training wheel jutting to the left of the pair of traditionally thin ones, its own kickstand unneeded and levered up.

Upon closer inspection, the chalked unicorn’s open mouth shouted indignance. Both unicorn and yellow cartoon figure sported fangs.

Inside, passing book-laden shelves into a hallway and toward the sunlit kitchen, a man swinging a briefcase in counterpoint with his stride tucked and plucked at his suit. Another man had stationed himself within the kitchen ahead of him and was making use of its modern amenities.

Benjamin - he of the briefcase - set his business down just inside the open doorway with the air of one tired before the day had properly begun. “Millie e-mailed me.”

Paul looked across the marble island to the other side of their little kitchen to his husband, who sidled up and perched on a stool, and resumed pouring B-positive into a stainless shaker alongside a healthy measure of vodka. “Did she?”

“Mhm.” Benjamin’s mouth thinned as it did in response to all things Paul’s sister. He plucked up a parsley clipping and spun it between his fingers. “The Era of Quabbalah has given way to a new age. A New Age new age, to wit.”

The silver shaker undulated in Paul’s hand, its surface reflecting narrowed funhouse versions of the kitchen. The streaks were reminiscent of stars drifting into lines whenever a spaceship accelerated on Benjamin’s Star Trek shows and Paul continued a little longer than necessary, enamored with the feel of shifting cocktail mixture and cold metal in the way of all novice bartenders. “Back to the Future?”

Ben’s left dimple made a brief appearance. “Thank you for acknowledging science fiction, love. I know it pains your hobbit-loving heart.”

Paul waggled his eyebrows. “It pays to be on your good side.”

At that, Ben’s reluctant amusement gave way both to snort and rare fang-revealing smile. “I’ll remember that later.”

Paul set the shaker down and drew a bottle of tomato juice closer, unscrewing the lid, enjoying the little jolt his husband’s unaffected smile always gave him. “So it’s Wicca.”  
  
“Not quite. Something she found on Tumblr.” Ben rolled his eyes. “One of two things, actually. What do you know about _ Homestuck?” _

“Nothing at all.” Paul set the tomato juice back down and slid a finger over his phone’s screen, tapping the input field and typing. “Let’s see what Google has to say.” A few seconds of blank search engine page preceded wikia articles and columns of images. Paul tapped one of the images and brought it to the fore. 

A grey-skinned, armless gremlin glared balefully at him over the mother of all jagged overbites, a child’s comical interpretation of murderousness. The effect was somewhat diluted by the Capricorn symbol on their shirt and what looked like bowling shoes protruding from beneath baggy pants.

Paul grimaced. “Less was definitely not more.” He slid the phone around and lifted it for Ben’s inspection.

Ben’s smile submerged back into resignation. “Good to know her astrology period didn’t go to waste, I suppose.” He leaned back and seemed to take in the assortment of cocktail paraphernalia for the first time. “She sounded quite chuffed about her discovery… what _ are _you doing?”

A liberal infusion of tomato juice went into the shaker, and Paul’s phone was forgotten in his excitement. “You’re going to love this.”

Ben’s face tightened in doubt. “That remains to be seen.” He looked back toward the living room. “The girls are awfully quiet, don’t you think?”

“The girls’re fine, Ben.” 

He turned back to Paul and hissed wearily. “What is this?”

Paul dribbled something from a small can through a handheld strainer into the shaker, set those aside, and topped the big silver cup. He shook once, twice, then poured the mixture into a tall glass. He dropped a celery stalk into the liquid and slid the final product over to his husband. “The Bloody Caesar.”

Ben ran a hand through his dark brown hair and rotated the glass with his other hand. “That tells me very little, light of my life.”

“It’s classy and popular in Manhattan.”

Pretty blue eyes pinned Paul from across the island. “True of the bad version of clam chowder.”

“So you admit there’s a _ good _ clam chowder.”  
  
_ “Paul.” _

“Just try it.”

Paul watched Ben lift the glass, sniff, scowl, and nose his way around the celery to drink. Ben coughed and nearly slammed the glass back on the marble top. _ “Paul.” _

“Yes? It’s the tomato juice, isn’t it? Is it about the tomatoes?”

_ " Clam. Juice. Paul.” _

Paul felt disappointed, but stalled a nascent defense of his artwork as a tiny force of nature topped with red hair barreled gracelessly out of the hallway and across the den toward them.

“Dad? Daaaad?” Callie had begun distinguishing them in the way she spoke, the first _ dad _for Benjamin and the second beseeching tone cultivated exclusively for Paul. She thumped to a halt. “Igottaquestion.”

Ben turned, and both men waited.

Callie drew in a preparatory breath, let it out in a theatrical gust, then inhaled to speak. “Fish is brain food, right?”

Ben nodded and Paul answered. “Best brain food there is.”

Their daughter depressurized in comedic relief, her voice taking on the self-satisfied tone of one proven right. “Can you come tell Sierra, then? She swallowed Spongebob and now she’s crying but I told her it was fine because fish is brain food and-”

Paul rounded the kitchen island and both fathers took off running.

…………………

_ Not thirty minutes ago… _

“Spongebob’s gonna die.” Sierra sounded unhappy.

Callie stopped tapping the bowl and looked up at her sister. “No he’s not. We just fed him.”

Sierra rolled her eyes in that way Callie was beginning to understand would accompany most of her sister’s rebuttals now, an expression that’d bloomed just this year and had thrived since Sierra’s tenth birthday. “I don’t mean right _ now, _dingletron.” Sierra put her pencil down atop her homework and slid the mess aside, casting a world-weary ten-year-old’s gaze on the goldfish inside the bowl. “I mean eventually. It’s inevitable.”

Callie grimaced. _ Inevitable _had become her sister’s new favorite word, and it always sounded snooty to her. “You’re just having a mood. It’s ‘cause you’re gonna be a teenager.”

“I’m _ not _being moody!”

“Yes you are.” Callie tried on a smug tone. “It’s _ inevitable.” _

“Says who? And that’s not how that word works.”

Callie shrugged. “Says Paul-Dad. I heard them talking about it. You’re gonna be a teenager, and they’re _ all _ moody.” She dropped the natural trappings of London from her pronunciation, supplanting them with an approximation of Paul’s uppah-New-England. _ “‘The unicorns’ll go, Ben, whole herd in favor of punk rock and protest.’” _

Sierra wrinkled her nose in something she probably thought dismissive and Callie thought looked silly, but her tone was amused now. “Whatever, dingletron.” She looked back at the goldfish, watching him drag the bowl looking for food scraps, and no doubt she entertained the nascent beginnings of punk rock, whatever that was. “Spongebob’s mortal. Means he’ll kick the bucket soon.”

Callie thought back, knowing she might’ve gaffed with _inevitable _but was certain she had just the response if only memory would cough it up. She tried to imagine it, Dad-Ben asking what he’d put inside their breakfast pastries just yesterday, face going flat when Dad-Paul had answered with _leeks _and responding in turn with a criticism that’d captured Callie’s attention; it was a brain-word, she was sure. Something about hospitals being “institutions,” and…

She stuck her tongue out at Sierra. “That’s _ mental.” _

Her efforts netted another eye-roll. Disappointed, Callie put her chin on the table and looked back at the fish.

Sierra’s voice grew thoughtful. “Nah, it’s physical, isn’t it? Death’s physical.”

Despite herself, Callie was drawn in by the sound of her older sister’s authority. “I don’t want Spongebob to die.”

“What if,” Sierra sounded galvanized now, “I mean, what if he didn’t have to?”

Callie looked up through the transparent walls of the goldfish bowl, half-amused by the way the water warped her sister’s face and bushy blonde hair into an inscrutable collage of shapes. “We can’t turn him. You know we’re too little to turn people and even adults have a hard time.”

“Yeah, but that’s people. Spongebob’s a fish.”

Hope stirred, but a thought like a punch struck Callie. “How will we feed him?”

Sierra tapped the bowl with the pad of her index finger. “If we can turn him, we’ll have time to figure that out.” She sounded matter-of-fact, settled, on the home stretch toward action. She didn’t even look at Callie. “Spongebob’s your fish. Your choice.”

Feeling a little manipulated but not sure how - and less interested in that feeling than in the other one Spongebob’s imminent demise engendered - she sat up and looked at her sister.

Sierra, for one, looked untroubled. As she had whenever she’d recruited Callie to her cause. Last time, that look had preceded an accumulated mess of pillows, glue, straw plucked from the lawn seeding, and a half-eviscerated vegetable drawer, all to the purpose of scarecrow creation. They’d been tired of the birds’ gravelly communiqués denying both of them a summer’s unique opportunity to sleep in. A later discovery had it that some pillows fetched close to a hundred bucks even when they were objectively hideous, and crows were not, in fact, terrified by Pottery Barn chic.

_ Yeah, but Spongebob’s life is on the line. _

Callie inhaled, exhaled, and slumped as though deflated, her own little ritual for important announcements. Her six years’ worth of experience with the world told her that, in fairness, they were due for success after the dismal scarecrow failure, a debt owed them by some nebulous law of averages more imagined than impressed upon her by reality. 

Another inhale, this one purposeful. “Do it.”

Like a doctor confident in their trade and selecting surgical tools from a nearby cart, Sierra drew open a desk drawer and retrieved the netted scoop used to move Spongebob from bowl to water cup when the former was due a cleaning. Wiggling it at the bowl threateningly, Sierra growled, “be a good fish.”

Hands splayed on the desk and thumbs hooked around the edge, Callie watched her sister dip the little net into the bowl and swirl it around, following a now-panicked goldfish in circles.

“Maybe if you go backwards and surprise him?”

“Shhh! I’m working.”

Callie was too invested now to argue with her sister’s tone. She shushed.

Around went the net, stirring the colorful pebbles at the bottom with the promise of a whirlpool. Spongebob’s standard locomotion was a leisurely thing to behold under normal circumstances, but he could dart when the urge struck, and it seemed his little world being distrubed by Sierra’s ministrations offered enough motivation.

Circles became figure-eights, and Spongebob was netted. Sierra lifted him out of the bowl with her free hand cupped around the hard rim of the net, which dripped onto the carpet. “Can’t have him out in the air long.” She shifted her eyes to Callie, and Callie heard the first thread of uncertainty in her sister’s voice. “Here goes.”

Sierra dumped the wriggling goldfish into her palm, dropping the scoop onto the desk, and opened her mouth. Her little fangs descended, and she lifted Spongebob to one.

She tilted her head back as she did so, and Callie spoke up. “Wait-”

It happened too fast for warning or waiting. Callie saw Spongebob’s bug-eyed face squeeze into the gap between her sister’s thumb and index finger, mouth gaping as if in terror, then disappear as though dragged away.

She saw a lump descend Sierra’s throat in time with a wet gagging noise.

Sierra stood there, frozen in shock, eyes as comically wide as Spongebob’s when his head had protruded from between her fingers. The moment passed, and her sister’s hand clamped over her mouth.

_ Too late for that, _ Callie thought with a kind of muted internal calm. _ He’s down the hatch. _

It seemed Sierra understood this, too, and removed the hand. She pointed wildly at the door and hummed high-pitched, openmouthed panic.

Callie watched in fascination as a single iridescent speck of gold scale reflected morning sunlight from her sister’s right fang, hysteria threatening to spew out. Sierra’s hand flapped like one of Spongebob’s fins and that did Callie in, giggles pouring free despite feeling no smile behind it.

Sierra’s eyes filled with indignant, terrified tears and she gestured again. She wailed without words, although Callie couldn’t understand what prevented her from just saying what she wanted given her mouth wasn’t even remotely full now.

Callie hopped off the chair. “It’ll be okay, we’ll get another goldfish. Besides, fish is brain food, Lexis says so-”

Her sister’s wail increased in both volume and pitch. She flapped the hand doorward again.

“Okay, _ okaaay, _I’m going.” Callie made for the door, stopped, turned, and took in Sierra’s panicky arrest. It was an unsettling thing to behold. She supposed she should say something comforting.

“Just stay right there.”

She didn’t need Sierra’s glare to tell her how unwelcome _that _was.

She turned again and made a beeline for the hallway.

…………………

Paul stood to one side of Sierra in front of the toilet. Benjamin offered her a plastic dosage cup filled to the first relief guideline with warm brown liquid. Their daughter’s trusting brown eyes asked the question she refused to, _ “is this going to hurt?” _

Ben handled the practical parenting. It was Paul’s turn. “It’ll make you sick, but only for a little while. It’ll get Spongebob out and you’ll both feel better.”

Callie cheered unhelpfully from just outside the bathroom. “Sick-him-UP! Sick-him-UP!”

_ “Calliope.” _Ben’s authority fell like an inversion of low thunder.

Blessedly, she needed no further encouragement and fell quiet.

“It won’t hurt, Sierra. Just makes you throw up, that’s all.” Paul rubbed their daughter’s back and watched her bring the dose cup closer to her mouth, for the moment not considering how in the hell his and Ben’s daughters reasoned their way into this kind of thing or that this already represented - even by their standards - a memorable installment of the girls’ ongoing refusal to behave like children portrayed in parental guidance books. He focused instead on reassuring her. “You can rest on the couch with your blanket, and we’ll get you soup and ice cream-”

Sierra’s eyes bulged again. She dropped the plastic cup - which Rorschach-splattered its contents all over Ben’s pants leg - thrusting herself toward the open bowl, and vomited.

Paul looked up over at Benjamin, who shrugged and softened his censure with a half-smile. “Almost as good as the Bloody Caesar, love.”

Paul tried to narrow his eyes, but the scope of his memory took in the morning, the absurdity of it all, and he turned his head right with a hand obscuring his face from amused husband and curious younger daughter. He shook quietly and snorted once over the sound of Sierra’s commune with the commode. It was all the wrong time to laugh, and that made it harder to stop.

He heard as Sierra hawked, spat, and straightened. Stifling his mirth, he looked up as Ben offered her a bundle of tissue and she wiped her mouth with it, panting and sniffling.

“Did she sick him up?” Callie’s commitment to quiet had ended quickly, as it usually did. “Is he in the toilet now? That’s where dead fish go.” This she spoke in tones of one who’d heard gospel directly from a prophet. “Lexis told me so, and she’s in _ eighth grade.” _

Bubbling humor plucked at Benjamin’s mouth and contorted his cheeks. His tone spiralled up with it. _ “Eighth grade, _Paul. Our girls are ahead of the curve.”

Paul exhaled as though socked in the gut, self-possessed enough to end it with a weak _ choo! _ to cover the painful expelling as anything - _ anything - _save laughter at his children’s expense. It did the service of reminding him why they were assembled in the bathroom, and he looked down into the bowl.

There was precious little, thankfully, since breakfast hadn’t yet been ticked off in the morning checklist. Just a few floating islands of pinkish froth and what looked suspiciously like bits of pre-breakfast candy.

And one goldfish-sized lump which looked as though it’d been surprised during a bubble bath.

Unmoving.

Paul became reacquainted with seriousness. “I think…”

Unmoving became moving. First a lurch, then a shimmy as though the fish was protesting his treatment and the morning’s events on the whole.

Finally he swam, investigating the shape of the toilet bowl. Paul noticed a spot near his tail where the fish had been neatly gouged, a couple of scales missing.

He saw the others move in closer in his peripheral vision, and heard Callie’s small, socked feet pat linoleum as she came to offer additional perspective.

The family watched in silence as Spongebob made his rounds, offering his damaged side to view with every far pass around the bowl. With each lap the gouge grew less deep, its diameter shrinking, shrinking, until it was gone.

The scales remained missing.

“I’ll be-” but Benjamin was drowned out.

“YOU DID IT, SIERRA! SPONGEBOB’S A VAMPIREFISH!” The other three jumped as Callie announced success in too loud a voice for the enclosed space. She’d transitioned more to Ben’s British accent in her excitement. “TURNED HIM PROPER! SPONGEBOB’S A VAMPIRE!”

Paul saw Sierra smile weakly into the toilet, throat audibly abraded and tremors in her voice, but possessed of no less awe than Callie. “Cool.”

He looked up at Benjamin, trying to think his questions at his husband and wishing all the ridiculous human-authored vampire stories were true insofar as telepathy was concerned. _ What the hell do we do? This isn’t exactly breaking curfew or being up past bedtime, Ben. What do we do about this? _

Benjamin was no less telepathically receptive than Paul was capable of sending a telepathic message. He shrugged, picking the plastic cup off the floor and tossing it in the wastebasket wedged in by the counter, then hugged Sierra to him with one arm. “Yeah. That’s pretty cool.”

_ I guess it is pretty cool. _

…………………

Sierra had recovered rapidly afterward, and by that afternoon the girls were holed up in Callie’s bedroom, still enthralled with their victory and no doubt on voluntary observation duty rather than playing. They’d moved Spongebob from toilet to cup, letting the traumatized goldfish rinse himself off, then replaced him in his bowl.

He’d lost his taste for fish food. When the four of them had stood around the table like students watching a professor execute an experiment for their instructional benefit, Sierra had gone for the little container of flakes and returned with it, sprinkling a few for Spongebob’s troubles.

Spongebob, it seemed, no longer cared for them. He’d investigated, sucked one in, then spat it back out with such vehemence that he’d jet-burst himself backward. He’d passed the others without further experimentation, thoroughly uninterested.

Further tests had revealed the nature of Spongebob’s new diet.

Paul reclined with Benjamin on the couch, only halfway listening to Captain Something-Or-Other wax philosophical about paranoia undermining Starfleet’s integrity under theatrical budget courtroom lighting, and soft-nudged his husband’s slippered foot with one of his own as he spoke. “So, who’s making the call to… who the hell do we call? Fish and Wildlife? The EPA? The FDA? The FBI? Who handles cannibal vampire goldfish?”

Benjamin sunk-shuffled himself deeper into the cushions and the little nest offered by Paul’s extended arm. “I don't know. I’m not calling anybloodyone.” He patted Paul’s slippered foot in return. “You deal with more fish in your line of work than I do mine.”

“Yes, but the fish are usually dead when they reach me. I just add the spice.”

Ben sounded indulgent. “You certainly do.”

There was quiet for a little while, save the dialogue from the television and the distinctive hiss of the Enterprise’s doors now and again.

Paul wondered, “do we have to call anyone?”

“It’d be irresponsible not to.”

“Mhm.” Paul worried at it. “I looked online for anything similar.”

“Any luck?”

“Closest was an attempt on a border collie two years ago somewhere in Minnesota. Dog went ghoul, didn’t get enough of it to go vampire.”

Sympathy clutched Ben's voice and softened it. “That had to be hard on them.”

“Oh yeah, it was bad. Family was devastated. I guess Animal Control picked up the dog, but not before she’d made a mound of animal corpses she’d found in the woods and buried herself in them. She was halfway to finishing the transformation, had to be flash-fried.” Paul felt himself cringe a little. “But that was all. Not a lot beyond speculation, some people trying to speak with authority on it but I got the impression it was more or less like Millie talking about her crystal healing.”

“So we’ve an anomalous situation on our hands.”

“We do.”

Ben sighed. “I think it’d do us well to keep awareness of our daughters’ success limited to us.”

Paul agreed. “Probably.” He leaned into Ben’s hair and smiled. “Any regrets yet?”

“Hmm?”

“For,” Paul nuzzled the mess of Ben’s hair, “taking us on. Life was simpler before vampire Spongebobs and clam juice cocktails, wasn’t it?”

He felt Benjamin shake with quiet laughter. “Yes, it was. And it was unaccountably boring. I’m much happier now.”

Paul smiled. “Me, too.”

“Paul?”

“Hmm?”

“Fish is brain food.”

Paul burst out laughing and scooped Ben into a hug.


End file.
